Download Squad

In a victory for neo-Luddites the Author's Guild, Amazon has announced its intention to disable the speech to text function its new Kindle 2 ebook reader. Amazon announced its intention to selectively disable the device following criticism from the Author's Guild President Roy Blount Jnr. that the Kindle 2 would undermine the billion dollar a year audiobook market.

In a statement released to the press, Amazon argued that the text-to-speech feature was legal, but said that it would give authors the right to decide whether or not to disable the feature for their books:

'Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given... nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat... Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rights holders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title.'

It's unclear if the Author's Guild plans to now campaign to receive royalties from all other text-to-speech programs, but its hollow victory is sure to be received poorly by the visually impaired and any other consumers who are forking out around $350 bucks for their new Kindle and want to actually use the legal functionality that it has been designed with.

Hopefully Amazon will flag up which cheapskate publishers have disabled the text to speech functionality of their books very clearly, so that Kindle users can be sure to vote with their wallets and boycott those responsible for this shameful decision.

[Via the New York Times]

The latest version of Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle 2, has been attracting plenty of positive attention for its slimline form, style and functionality but has also drawn criticism from an unexpected quarter - from Authors Guild President and humorist, Roy Blount Jr, who isn't amused about the Kindle's new text to speech functionality.

The Kindle 2 has a function that allows published works that are downloaded onto the device to be converted into speech and played back through the small speakers in the device in either a male or female voice, functionality that will no doubt be attractive to the visually impaired, drivers on long trips or for people who are simply too damn lazy to read the book themselves.

The Authors Guild is in a tizzy because it feels that the Kindle 2 is going to undermine the billion dollar a year audiobook market. Blount apparently wasn't joking when he wrote in a New York Times editorial this week that 'authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2's version of books'.

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It's fairly difficult to muster up sympathy for Facebook's management when it comes to the current user revolt over changes to the site's terms and conditions of use (or T&Cs as they are commonly know). After all we've seen it all before, anyone remember lefty singer songwriter Billy Bragg's 2006 MySpace Revolution? Putting aside the irony that it's likely that the MySpace revolution is the only one that Billy Bragg will ever lead, the 2006 Revolt was a blueprint for Facebook's 2009 controversy.

Back in 2006 MySpace changed its T&Cs to provide for an ongoing license to any content posted on the service as they saw fit, fast forward to 2009 and Facebook has done substantially the same thing. Back in 2006 an activist user revolt lead by Bragg forced a turnaround from MySpace, fast forward to 2009 and (absent Billy Bragg) Facebook has done exactly the same thing.

So, what were they thinking at Facebook? Why would a massively successful site show such a disrespect for its users?

While people may put up with the most draconian clauses drafted into the T&Cs for Windows Vista or Adobe Acrobat, generally because they never read them and they couldn't change them if they wanted to, when it comes to online media and the Web things are different. Facebook users should be concerned about the T&Cs, they constitute the terms of the contract between Facebook and its users and is a legally binding document. In an ideal world contracts for services should be negotiated between the parties, in the case of most Web sites and software companies that rarely happens, but this time the users have struck back and are now appear to be collectively negotiating that contract through online activism.

The drafting of Terms and Conditions for Web sites is a tricky business, lawyers must weigh up the potential risks of litigation against the possibility that the terms and conditions will sufficiently turn off users from using the site. When it comes to social media sites there is another significant concern – that users will revolt, start discussion groups, stop posting photos of their cats, and make statements to the media that generate poor publicity for the site.

Lawyers for social media sites need to have a nuanced understanding of the site's fundamental business and pay attention to risks that might impact the business both inside and outside the courtroom.

Given that Facebook would have been well aware of the MySpace case, a cynical observer might suggest that the manner in which Facebook clearly highlighted the changes to the T&C showed that Facebook's management was well aware of the possibility of a user revolt and that their subsequent response would have been mapped out in advance. Facebook's subsequent response to revert back to the previous T&C an to enter into a process of consultation

Users have good reason to be worried about large corporations infringing on their IP rights or privacy. How many users would want to be featured in a Facebook tie up with US Magazine of top ten of "Facebook Funniest Drunken Party Photos" or see their "25 Random Things About Me" reprinted without permission or compensation in an
"Official Facebook 25 Things" book?

Given the dominance of Facebook in the social media world it seems unlikely that this hiccup will only result in the cancellation of a tiny number of hardcore users while at the same time continuing to generate headlines and page views for the site. Facebook and other social media sites need to establish exactly how far they can go when
it comes to the user generated content that drives their world and ensure that lawyers don't kill the golden goose by overreaching and draconian T&Cs. Ultimately Facebook needs to understand that when it comes to user generated content people do actually care and show some respect.

Pandora may be on the brink of self-destruction, but upstart music download service GrooveShark clearly believes in its style of predictive music programming with the launch of its new service, GrooveShark Autoplay.

GrooveShark originally launched with a radical new model which proposed to commercialize P2P by allowing users to be rewarded for sharing songs that were purchased by other users.

Since the initial launch of GrooveShark the company has also launched a Web based download solution 'GrooveShark Lite' which features a substantial music library to compliment the service's P2P features which also allows for full previews of songs on the site.

The addition of the Autoplay service to GrooveShark Lite turns the site into a Pandora style radio station as it allows consumers to search for tracks, listen in and then click on Autoplay which will build a playlist based on your initial choice. Autoplay can then proceed to build a picture of your listening interests with then subsequent user feedback on the selected tracks which allows the user to give any particular track the thumbs up, thumbs down or add the track to your favorites.

With Pandora threatening to close down, it will be interesting to see if GrooveShark can avoid the royalty woes that have afflicted the Web radio giant and prove that Web radio and music downloads can both be made to pay.

[Via GrooveShark Lite]

A far reaching transformation of domain names could be in store as Internet guardians, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meets to discuss changes to top level domain names.

According to a report from the BBC, ICANN has plans to deregulate top level domain names to allow any string of letters to be used as a top level domain, paving the way for long proposed domains such as .xxx, for company names like .Disney or even personal names such as .gordonfinlayson to be used as a domain name.

The proposed system would also allow for internationalization of domain names so that additional new languages and characters could be used to register domains which will be a plus for the billions of people who don't use Latin alphabets.

ICANN will vote on the proposal on Thursday on the last day of a series of public meetings which are being held in Paris this week. ICANN acts as the guardian of all Internet domain names and more informally as a global regulator of the Internet, but such services don't come cheap and the new domain names could see the cash rolling in for ICANN.

The release of a new domain name system could see a feeding frenzy as people individuals and companies compete to acquire catchy or unique domain names, and will no doubt be a considerable disappointment to all the poor saps who have paid good money for quality .com, .net or .tv domain names. All this is is inevitably going to result in a ton of new disputes over precedence for registrations, trade marks and issues like obscenity so lets hope ICANN has a really good dispute resolution procedure in the works.

[Via the BBC]